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Comment by iskander | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about this google project. Can autonomous cars (i) drive on the highway (ii) drive at night (iii) drive in snow or rain?

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Autonomous cars have driven on the highway in real-traffic conditions [1], [2], although they had a driver at the ready in the event of any problem. I don't know about night or weather conditions for these instances.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP (their citations pages aren't responding at the moment)

[2] - http://www.argo.ce.unipr.it/argo/english/index.html

They talk about weather issues in this video at 3:40.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkYFIhJ3rnY

In summary: They can handle darkness and rain, but not snow.

If you're interested, Sebastian Thrun has an intro to the topic as this course (you can preview all videos and problems)

http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs373/CourseRev/apr20...

Driving at night and the rain will probably be where autonomous cars really outshine humans. Lidar systems don't care if you are wearing all black during a night at new moon.

Snow is much harder for the time being. A snow drift falling off a car can make a google car think a cooler has appeared in the road.

Could it handle Lombard Street?

How would it react to a roadway that's covered in several feet of water due to flooding (and poor road design)? Or sinkholes? One-way streets? Freeways which change directions at different times of day? Dirt roads? (Can we make it autonomously offroad?) How will it react during an earthquake or tornado? How will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's path, when the car has a green light? When the car comes across kids playing football/street hockey/baseball in the street, will it stop for them? How far out of the way will the kids have to move before the car thinks it's safe to go past?

Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage?

Yes, a Google autonomous car drove down Lombard Street: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at....

Here you can see video of self-driving cars handling Lombard Street, as well as dirt roads, off-road driving, pedestrians and bicyclists and other obstacles in the road, plus tons of information about how they work:

https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/48

https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/209

https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/210 (Lombard Street at about 4:40)

One thing that strikes me is how much more these robots can potentially see than a human driver. Imagine how much better you could drive if you could see in all directions at once with multiple range-finding sensors and cameras, track dozens of moving objects simultaneously, never get sleepy or look away from the road at the wrong time, react to events in milliseconds, and learn from hundreds of thousands of miles of training data as your driving "experience".

Google's algorithm (which Strum seems to be pollinating everywhere -- and good, because the old algorithms were failing DARPA tests) is to pre-map the road. The car knows exactly where it is and what is supposed to be there, which it also compared with what it sees now.

How will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's path, when the car has a green light?

It will stop. In fact, the "failure mode" of self-driving cars will be how pedestrians can bully them by stepping in front of them so they stop.

When the car comes across kids playing football/street hockey/baseball in the street, will it stop for them?

There is already video of this. The radar/lidar isn't good enough to see a baseball, but it's definitely good enough to see a kid.

Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage?

It will probably pull over and stop if something is wrong.

Interesting case here for carjackers. You're Google car probably won't floor it in the middle of the night through a red light when an armed gang approaches your car. Then again I guess that's what "manual" is for.

Carjacking a car loaded with recording equipment that probably phones home with GPS and other environmental data probably isn't the best idea.

carjackers aren't known for their brilliance

Everything you've just said would have come up in numerous meetings before they even started planning how the system would work.

I guess another good question is: "how well do humans handle these things?"

I think the answer is: "not very well."

The original DARPA Grand Challenge was set in the desert on dirt roads. It's not that difficult to identify the road given some assumptions about how roads work (e.g., it's likely to be a slightly different color or texture)

I thought they were limited to driving on the highway in the empty parts of nevada?

that is for a car with no human in it, afaik. the google cars drive on normal roads with other cars present

To date, all Google autonomous cars have had two occupants - a driver (who is strictly hands-off - she's only there in case something goes wrong) and a tech who monitors the data to make sure things are proceeding as expected.

I've seen the Google self-driving car navigating within morning traffic in San Jose. There were two men with laptops in the driver and passenger seats, presumably monitoring the car and available to step in if something went wrong. It was also kind of surprising to see the roof-mounted device it used to map its surrounding. It was fairly large and rapidly rotating.

The device on top is a laser scanner creating a cloud point map for spatial awareness.

Did it look like this: http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx

Very impressive spec - as you'd expect for a $75,000 product.

I drove behind one yesterday as it returned to Google HQ in Mountain View. It was pretty exciting. It was also rush hour, and people didn't like that it tried so hard to give a safe amount of space in front and behind itself - it ended up being a little bubble of lane-changing space that moved slower than the rest of traffic.

Not that I hold any of this against the car - it was clearly doing the intelligent thing. But people... we are animals.

Weird. Your post didn't have a reply link. I had to click the permalink for it.

Anyway, I wanted to say that I read an article about a guy in Seattle that always kept a couple car lengths ahead of him. I seem to remember the article saying he was able to get home quicker that way than by behaving like the rest of the cars on the road.

http://trafficwaves.org/

I too live in the Seattle area, and I've heard of this technique. Sadly, when implementing it, all you see is the angry drivers behind you who rush to pass and gobble up the traffic bubble you've been saving.

I thought that this was covered by the Traffic Waves guy who said his method deals with that problem quite well?

Yep: it doesn't happen, FAQ: http://trafficwaves.org/tfaq.html#five

- if truckers can maintain a bubble, how can it be impossible?

- yes, aggressively weaving drivers sometimes jump in ...then they jump out again.

- at merge zones, the entire point is to let people into your lane.

- In theory, everyone else wants your precious bubble. In practice, not.

...and in a burning building, we all know the best way to escape, eh? EVERYONE AGGRESSIVELY PUSH FORWARD, DON'T LET ANYONE ELSE GET PAST, COOPERATION AND TEAMWORK ARE FOR LOSERS! Yep, that certainly won't trigger a huge clogged mess where everyone dies.

That's the one. Thanks!

Meta: there's a delay between when a comment is posted, and when the reply link becomes active. That delay is larger for deeper comment threads. I've never heard an official explanation, but one can imagine a few reasonable ones, e.g. to encourage people to stop and think in heated back-and-forth exchanges.

Seems like the safe distance in front of a robot car would be significantly less than for that of a car driven by a human. Of course, most humans I know think that the safe distance is 2 feet, which is probably less still.

They probably have to assume the human co-pilot may still need to assume control and avert disaster, and give them enough extra time to do that (beyond the time they'd need after starting out in control). With no need for failover, the robot should reliably react faster, though it's probably only reacting to immediate events rather than predicting drivers' (mis)behavior.

Most people stay way too close to the car in front, though. You're doing well as long as nothing unexpected happens. But if someone for some reason has to hit the brake really fast, you'll get a completely unnecessary pileup.

The Google cars probably also have additional margins of safety to allow for the driver to react to unexpected computer behavior _and_ actually step in and perform the maneuver himself.

  > Most people stay way too close to the car in front, though.

Yes, and people who don't care about this risk are very annoying drivers for the people who do.

I usually lightly tap the brake pedal, to let the lights come on, when they're too close behind me.

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